Sometime ago, I happened to be in a school where a 10 year old white boy was about to be arrested for making a racist remark; he had used the ‘N’ word when referring to a black pupil. He admitted doing it. It was obvious he hadn’t realised it was wrong to use such words. He thought it was a normal way to describe black people. So quite innocent! Fortunately, I was able to intervene and, with a lot of help from senior people in Education, the police were persuaded not to go ahead with the arrest.
The Head emailed me the next day and said had the arrest had gone ahead, it would have put their community relations back at least 10 years.
I went back to the school a bit later because they appeared to have a rise in racist incidents triggered; it seems, by the increase in non-white pupils in the school. After a bit of discussion, it turned out that some of the comments were simply ‘racial’ and there was no racism intended or perceived. This has reduced the numbers of incidents and will hopefully give them more time to attend to the really serious matters.
The school have also decided to look back at some of their incidents to see how the pupils have moved on positively in their attitudes as a result of the work of the school and other positive influences.
Over the weekend, I thought this article from Rod Liddle was a good reminder of how ‘race’ has been trivialised. There is a vast distance between killing someone because of their race and buying a T shirt!
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Submitted by karamat on Mon, 2010-03-01 11:54.